the raven king (excerpt)

8/18/2019 The Raven King (Excerpt)

1/14


2/14

M AGGIE STIEFVATER

S C H O L A S T I C P R E S S • N E W Y O R K

the

RAVENKINGBook IV of

the Raven Cycle


3/14

For Sarah,

who gallantly took the Seat Perilous

Copyright © 2016 by Maggie Stiefvater

All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Press, an imprint ofScholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920 . scholastic, scholastic press,and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarksof Scholastic Inc.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assumeany responsibility for author or third-party websites or theircontent.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrievalsystem, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without writ-ten permission of the publisher. For information regardingpermission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: PermissionsDepartment, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, andincidents are either the product of the author’s imagination orare used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, livingor dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirelycoincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

ISBN 978-0-545-42498-1

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 16 17 18 19 20

Printed in the U.S.A. 23

First edition, May 2016

Book design by

Christopher Stengel


4/14

4

1

D

epending on where you began the story, it was a story

about the women of 300 Fox Way.

Stories stretch in all ways. Once upon a time, there

was a girl who was very good at playing with time. Step side-

ways: Once upon a time, there was a daughter of a girl who was

very good at playing with time. Now skip back: Once upon a

time, there was a king’s daughter who was very good at playing

with time.

Beginnings and endings as far as the eye could see.

With the notable exception of Blue Sargent, all of the women

at 300 Fox Way were psychic. This might have suggested that

the house’s occupants had much in common, but practically, they

had as much in common as a group of musicians, or doctors, or

morticians. Psychic was not so much a personality type as a skill

set. A belief system. A general agreement that time, like a story,was not a line; it was an ocean. If you couldn’t find the precise

moment you were looking for, it was possible you hadn’t swum

far enough. It was possible that you simply weren’t a good enough

swimmer yet. It was also possible, the women grudgingly agreed,

that some moments were hidden far enough in time that they

really should be left to deep-sea creatures. Like those anglerfishwith all the teeth bits and the lanterns hanging off their faces. Or


5/14

5

like Persephone Poldma. She was dead now, though, so perhaps

she was a poor example.

It was a Monday when the still-living women of 300 Fox

Way decided to finally assess Richard Gansey’s impendingdoom, the disintegration of their lives as they knew them, and

what those two things had to do with each other, if anything.

Also, Jimi had done a chakra cleansing in exchange for a nice

bottle of hot, peaty whiskey and was jonesing to finish it with

company.

Calla stepped into the biting October day to turn the sign

beside the letter box to read closed come back soon ! Inside, Jimi,

a big believer in herb magick, brought out several small pillows

stuffed with mugwort (to enhance the projection of the soul into

other planes) and set rosemary to burn over charcoal (for mem-

ory and clairvoyance, which are the same thing in two different

directions). Orla shook a smoldering bundle of sage over the

tarot decks. Maura filled a black-glass scrying bowl. Gwenllian

sang a gleeful, nasty little song as she lit a circle of candles and let

the blinds down. Calla returned to the reading room with three

statues cradled in the crook of her arm.

“It smells like a goddamn Italian restaurant in here,” she told Jimi, who did not pause in her humming as she fanned the smoke

and wiggled her large bottom. Calla placed the ferocious statue

of Oya by her own chair and the dancing statue of Oshun next to

Maura’s. She gripped the third statue: Yemaya, a watery Yoruban

goddess who had always stood beside Persephone’s place when

she wasn’t standing, on Calla’s bedroom dresser. “Maura, I don’tknow where to put Yemaya.”


6/14

6

Maura pointed to Gwenllian, who pointed back. “You said

you didn’t want to do this with Adam, so it goes by her.”

“I never said that,” Calla said. “I said he was too close to

all this.”The fact of the matter was that they were all too close to the

situation. They’d been too close to the situation for months.

They were so close to the situation that it was difficult to tell

whether or not they were the situation.

Orla stopped chomping her gum for a moment long enough

to ask, “Are we ready?”

“MmmmhmmmhmmmmissBluethoughmmmmhmmmm,”

offered Jimi, still humming and swaying.

It was true that Blue’s absence was notable. As a powerful

psychic amplifier, she would’ve been useful in a case like this, but

they’d agreed in whispers the night before that it was cruel to

discuss Gansey’s fate in front of her any more than was strictly

necessary. They’d make do with Gwenllian, even though she was

half as powerful and twice as difficult.

“We’ll tell her the upshot later,” Maura said. “I think I had

better get Artemus out of the pantry.”

Artemus: Maura’s ex-lover, Blue’s biological father, Glendower’sadviser, 300 Fox Way’s closet dweller. He had been retrieved

from a magical cave just a little over a week before and in that

time had managed to contribute absolutely nothing to their emo-

tional or intellectual resources. Calla found him spineless (she

was not wrong). Maura thought him misunderstood (she was

not wrong). Jimi reckoned he had the longest nose of any manshe’d ever seen (she was not wrong). Orla didn’t believe barricad-

ing oneself in a supply closet was a sufficient protection against


7/14

7

a psychic who hated you (she was not wrong). Gwenllian was, in

fact, the psychic who hated him (she was not wrong).

It took Maura quite a bit of doing to persuade him to leave

the pantry, and even after he’d joined them at the table, he didnot look at all like he belonged. Some of that was because he was

a man, and some of it was because he was much taller than every-

one else. But most of it was because he had dark, permanently

worried eyes that indicated he had seen the world and it was too

much for him. That earnest fear was entirely at odds with the

varying degrees of self-confidence carried by the psychics in

the room.

Maura and Calla had known him before Blue had been born

and both were thinking that Artemus was ever so much less than

he had been then. Well, Maura thought ever so much less . Calla

merely thought less , as she hadn’t had a very high opinion of him

to begin with. But then, lanky men who appeared out of mystical

groves had never been her type.

Jimi poured the whiskey.

Orla closed the doors to the reading room.

The women sat.

“What a cluster,” Calla said, by way of opening (she was notwrong).

“He can’t be saved, can he?” Jimi asked. She meant Gansey.

She was a little misty-eyed. It was not that she was intensely fond

of Gansey, but she was a very sentimental person, and the idea of

any young man being cut down in his youth troubled her.

“Mm,” said Maura.The women all took a drink. Artemus did not. He shot a

nervous look at Gwenllian. Gwenllian, always imposing with


8/14

8

a nest of towering hair full of pencils and flowers, glared back at

him. The heat in her expression should have ignited any alcohol

remaining in her shot glass.

Maura asked, “Do we need to stop it, then?”Orla, the youngest and loudest in the room, laughed in a

youthful and loud way. “How exactly would you stop him?”

“I said it , not him,” Maura replied, rather snottily. “I would

not pretend to imagine I have any power to stop that boy from

searching Virginia for his own grave. But the others.”

Calla put her glass down with force. “Oh, I could stop him.

But that’s not the point. It’s everything already in place.”

(Everything already in place: the retired hit man currently

sleeping with Maura; his supernatural-obsessed ex-boss cur-

rently sleeping in Boston; the creepy entity buried in rocks

beneath the ley line; the unfamiliar creatures crawling out of a

cave mouth behind an abandoned farmhouse; the ley line’s grow-

ing power; the magical sentient forest on the ley line; one boy’s

bargain with the magical forest; one boy’s ability to dream things

to life; one dead boy who refused to be laid to rest; one girl who

supernaturally amplified 90 percent of the aforementioned list.)

The women took another drink.“Should they keep going to that crazy forest?” Orla asked.

She did not care for Cabeswater. She had gone with the group

once before and had come close enough to the forest to . . . feel

it. Her sort of clairvoyance was best over telephone lines or email;

faces only got in the way of the truth. Cabeswater had no face,

and the ley line was basically the world’s best telephone line. Shehad been able to feel it asking her for things. She couldn’t tell

what they were, exactly. And she didn’t necessarily think they


9/14

9

were bad things. She could just sense the enormity of its requests,

the weight of its promises. Life-changing. Orla was just fine with

her life, thanks very much, so she’d tipped her hat and gotten out

of there.“The forest is fine,” Artemus said.

All of the women looked at him.

“Describe ‘fine,’ ” Maura said.

“Cabeswater loves them.” Artemus folded his enormous

hands in his lap and pointed his enormous nose at them. His

gaze kept jerking back to Gwenllian, as if he feared she might

leap at him. Gwenllian meaningfully snuffed one of the candles

with her shot glass; the reading room got one tiny fire darker.

“Care to elaborate?” Calla asked.

Artemus did not.

Maura said, “We’ll take that opinion under advisement.”

The women took a drink.

“Is any of us in this room going to die?” Jimi asked. “Did

anyone else we know appear at the church watch?”

“Doesn’t apply to any of us,” Maura said. The church watch

generally only predicted the deaths of those who had been born

in the town or directly on the spirit road (or, in Gansey’s case,re born), and everyone currently at the table was an import.

“Applies to Blue, though,” Orla pointed out.

Maura aggressively stacked and restacked her cards. “But it’s

not a guarantee of safety. There are fates worse than death.”

“Let’s shuff le, then,” said Jimi.

Each woman held her tarot deck to her heart, shuffled, andthen selected a single card at random. They placed the cards

faceup on the table.


10/14

1 0

Tarot is a very personal thing, and as such, the art on each

deck reflected the woman who owned it. Maura’s was all dark

lines and simple colors, at once perfunctory and childlike. Calla’s

was lush and oversaturated, the cards overflowing with detail.Every card in Orla’s deck featured a couple kissing or making

love, whether or not the card’s meaning was about kissing or

making love. Gwenllian had fashioned her own by scratching

dark, frantic symbols on a deck of ordinary playing cards. Jimi

stuck by the Sacred Cats and Holy Women deck that she’d found

in a thrift store in 1992.

All of the women had turned over five different versions of

the Tower. Calla’s version of the Tower perhaps best depicted the

card’s meaning: A castle labeled stability was in the process of

being struck by lightning, burning down, and being attacked by

what looked like garter snakes. A woman in a window was expe-

riencing the full effects of the lightning bolt. At the top of the

tower, a man had been thrown from the ramparts — or possibly

he had jumped. In any case, he was on fire as well, and a snake

flew after him.

“So we’re all going to die unless we do something,”

Calla said.Gwenllian sang, “Owynus dei gratia Princeps Waliae , ha la la,

Princeps Waliae , ha la la—”

With a whimper, Artemus made as if to stand. Maura placed

a steadying hand on his.

“We’re all going to die,” Maura said. “At some point. Let’s

not panic.”Calla’s eyes were on Artemus. “Only one of us is

panicking.”


11/14

1 1

Jimi passed around the whiskey bottle. “Time to find some

solutions, darlings. How are we looking for them?”

All of the women looked at the dark scrying bowl. There was

nothing inherently remarkable about it: it was an $11 glass dis-play bowl from one of those stores full of cat food, mulch, and

discount electronics. The cran-grape juice that filled it had no

mystical powers. But still, there was something ominous about it,

about how the fluid seemed a little restless. It reflected only the

dark ceiling, but it looked like it wanted to show more. The scry-

ing bowl contemplated possibilities, not all of them good.

(One of the possibilities: using the reflection to separate

your soul from your body and ending up dead.)

Although Maura was the one who had brought the bowl out,

she pushed it away now.

“Let’s do a whole-life reading,” Orla said. She popped

her gum.

“Ugh, no,” Calla said.

“For all of us?” Maura asked, as if Calla hadn’t protested.

“Our life as a group?”

Orla waved an arm to indicate all of the decks; her enormous

wooden bangles clicked against each other with satisfaction.“I like it,” Maura said. Calla and Jimi sighed.

Ordinarily, a reading used only a portion of the seventy-

eight cards in a deck. Three, or ten. Maybe one or two more, if

clarification was needed. Each card’s position asked a question:

What is the state of your unconscious? What are you afraid

of? What do you need? Each card placed in that position pro-vided the answer.

Seventy-eight cards was a lot of Q&A.


12/14


13/14

1 3

trunk, joining up with something sinister moldering in the root

that belonged to Gwenllian. It was obvious that this darkness

would be what killed them all if they did nothing, though it was

impossible to tell what precisely it was. The women’s clairvoy-ance had never been able to penetrate the area directly over the

ley line, and this darkness was centered there.

The solution to the darkness, however, existed outside of the

ley line. It was multifaceted, uncertain, and difficult. The upshot

was straightforward, though.

“They’re supposed to work together?” Calla said with

disbelief.

“That’s what it says,” Maura said.

Jimi reached for the whiskey bottle, but it was empty. “Can’t

we just take care of it ourselves?”

“We’re just people,” Maura replied. “Just ordinary people.

They’re special. Adam’s tied to the ley line. Ronan’s a dreamer.

Blue amplifies all of that.”

“Richie Rich is just a person,” Orla said.

“Yes, and he’s going to die.”

The women contemplated the spread again.

“Does this mean she’s still alive?” Maura asked, tapping on acard in one of the branches — the Queen of Swords.

“Probably,” Calla grunted.

“Does this mean she’s going to leave?” Orla asked, tapping

on another card and referring to a different she.

“Probably,” Maura sighed.

“Does this mean she’s coming back?” Calla demanded,pointing to a third card and meaning a third she.


14/14

1 4

“Probably,” shrieked Gwenllian, leaping up from the table.

She began to spin with her arms in the air.

None of them could sit still any longer. Calla pushed back

her chair. “I’m getting another drink.” Jimi clucked in agreement. “If it’s the end of the world, I

might as well, too.”

As the others left the table, Maura remained, looking at

Artemus’s poisoned branch of cards and at Artemus himself,

hunched behind it. Random men from mystical groves were no

longer her type. But still, she remembered loving Artemus, and

this Artemus was greatly diminished.

“Artemus?” she asked gently.

He didn’t lift his head.

She touched his chin with a finger; he flinched. She tilted his

face up so that they were eye to eye. He had never rushed to fill

spaces with words, and he still didn’t. He looked as if he might

never speak again, if he could help it.

Since they had both climbed out of the cave, Maura had not

asked him about anything that had happened in the years since

she’d seen him last. But now she asked, “What happened to you

to make you like this?”He closed his eyes.

the raven king (excerpt)

Documents